Flatstock 2008

"Everything is an inspiration: I did a set of 25 art prints from stuff I drew while sitting in traffic. This is New Jersey, after all."

On his Flatstock 2008 poster, left:

"This isn't really a poster, but a hotel door hanger. If you've been to SXSW you know that things will get hectic. Also, they aren't limited-edition prints or anything, so I can run off 1,000 of them and hand out something free to every person who visits my booth."

Keep reading for more examples of Kevin Mercer's work.

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Feist, September 2007, Philadelphia

"I designed this one on a dismal weekend, drinking lots of tea and hiding in my house. 'The Water' was the song that grabbed my attention, and the small water droplets and delicate smoke/floral graphic just worked themselves together perfectly. Both the ladies and the gentlemen dig this one a lot."

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TV on the Radio, April 2007, Philadelphia

"I was excited to do this poster, as their most recent record was knocking my socks off at the time. I was looking for something to match both the iconic and abstract quality of the music, and the dense color overlays and textures really put this one over the top."

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Explosions in the Sky, March 2007, Philadelphia

"One New Year's Eve I got to watch a sky full of fireworks from an 11th-story balcony. It was eerily quiet as the sky lit up with huge balls of sparkly fire. This band reminds me of that night, and the poster is an extension of that."

"Most rock posters try to jump off the wall at a viewer. I'm hoping to reach the viewer in the opposite way—to draw them inward, right through the wall, into another place."

On his Flatstock 2008 poster, left:

"I wanted to do something that would evoke Chicago. I had spotted a vacant storefront with an intriguing sign in the window, and shot it. Flatstock posters offer the artist an opportunity to follow their whims, which is what I am doing here."

Keep reading for more examples of Dan MacAdam's work.

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Queens of the Stone Age, February 2008, Stockholm

"[This] came to me in a flash. I spotted the car in Independence, Oregon, while driving by and immediately knew I had to do something with it. The next day, I was walking through my in-laws' filbert orchard on their nearby farm and found my setting. Badass cars show up from time to time in conjunction with QOTSA, but this poster concept also borrows heavily from ZZ Top's Eliminator album cover, which I love. I wanted to give this one a supernatural, menacing feel."

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Iron and Wine/Calexico, December 2005, Chicago

"This poster was one of the first that I did in this layered style using buildings, so it was pretty basic. The grain elevators were meant to evoke the intersection of rural and urban life and landscape, something that crops up in both bands' music. The yellowish light is a nod to Calexico's Southwestern roots and themes."

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Tortoise, spring 2007 tour

"In their music, the tension is created by establishing a pattern and then varying or disrupting it by introducing some contrasting element. In each Tortoise poster I've done, I've tried to represent this visually. In this case, the pattern is the grid of the windows on the rectangular wall. The disruptions are the diagonal surface of the hill on which it sits, and the single red window."

"Most of my designs are a culmination of lyrical elements, the band's visual themes, and the feelings that their music invokes. I always try to create something that is a visual representation of what I take from the music. I'm also influenced by the Northwest and other designers and visual artists."

On his Flatstock 2008 poster, left:

"This design was intended to emplify my overall style and design approach. But I wanted something more universal, since a lot of my designs tend to be very specific to the sensibility of the bands that they represent."

Keep reading for more examples of Andrew Crawshaw's work.

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Sunn O))), November 2007, Pacific Northwest tour

"Sunn is a loud, largely instrumental drone/doom band, and I wanted to create something that would personify the intensity and power of the band's sound. I opted to use organic shapes to create patterns and textures as a representation of sound and movement. This poster features two colors screened on sheet metal—it was my first attempt at screen-printing on metal."

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Boris, October 2007, Seattle

"Boris has always been a band with a widely varied sound. While they're generally a metal or heavy-rock band, this album is a lot pop-ier and catchy. With that in mind, I tried to focus on the feel of that particular record and create something that would project that."

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Isis, November 2007, Seattle

"I've made a handful of posters for Isis, and each one is different from the last. This one is based on different lines and themes in the lyrics from their last record, In the Absence of Truth. I make it a point to try and make a poster for them every time they come through Seattle."

"I enjoy both the tactile art of making posters using screen-printing and the result of seeing art up in the public eye. It's egalitarian and pedestrian in the same stroke. Music is a huge influence in my designs, especially improvised free jazz and heavy rock music, like Vandermark 5, Ornette Coleman, or the Melvins. It helps me channel my energy to the surface."

On his Flatstock 2008 poster, left:

"In keeping with the jokes common among lowbrow poster makers, this design refers to the printer devils that most artists encounter slithering out of a jar of Speedball Ink at 4 a.m., after printing posters for ten hours."

Keep reading for more examples of Dan Grzeca's work.

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Melvins, April 2007, Brussels

"The Melvins are a heavy, powerful band with an underlying sense of humor, although it might be hard to detect. Their last record, A Senile Animal, was astounding, and I wanted to make a powerful and strangely funny image to commemorate this show in Belgium. The goose was inspired by the puppet Garfield Goose, which was a children's show that ran in Chicago in the fifties and sixties. Garfield was sort of a Buster Keaton–like character, so the idea of turning him into some sort of doom-laden ship was funny to me."

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Explosions in the Sky, January 2008, Glasgow

"The [band's] song titles contain themes of birth and death, so I incorporated those into the images. The head in the corner is inspired by a Gorky painting from 1948 about Ulysses."

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Vandermark 5, January 2008, Chicago

"I was inspired by Verve and Blue Note jazz aesthetics at the time, and that influenced my drawing style. I came up with this futuristic neighborhood portrait. I want the viewer to interact with the poster. I try to do that through sophisticated-looking imagery and surfaces rather than the in-your-face approach."

"Rock posters are what got me into graphic design. I used to collect punk flyers off of telephone poles in high school. My bedroom walls were coated three layers deep. Rock posters are right up in your face, just like rock and roll. And you don't need a master's degree in art history to appreciate them…. Posters should be bold, you're supposed to be able to see them from across the street."

On his Flatstock 2008 poster, left:

"Every year for Austin I do something that plays on the whole 'Texas' thing. As a Northerner, I find the whole boots-and-cowboy-hats-and-guns lifestyle fascinating."

Keep reading for more examples of Dan Stiles' work.

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Wilco, August 2007, Berkeley, California

"When I got this assignment, the Sky Blue Sky album was just coming out, and the band said they wanted images of nature. One way to make an image stronger is to juxtapose it with its opposite—in this case the artificial world humans have created. Hence we have salmon swimming upstream in a bathtub."

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The Hold Steady, May 2007, Sasquatch! Music Festival

"All their songs are about the teenage experience. Regardless of the era, the experience is largely the same: drinking and making out in cars. There is a certain sadness to many of the songs, in that they are recollections of days gone by. For that reason, I gave the legs a ghostlike quality."

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Sonic Youth, June 2006, Seattle

"I think this is how most kids felt when they first heard Sonic Youth. I know I did."

"Inspiration comes from any number of sources: A vast library of books, from magic catalogs to Halloween collectibles to archaic Gothic-type faces, is indispensable. I also like to type in general ideas or words into Google or Flickr. I like to start with just general concepts like 'fire,' 'clouds,' or 'skull' and move on from there. I'll look at thousands of images in 15 minutes and refine my ideas. Or sometimes I just see some discarded trash on the sidewalk and 'Eureka! There it is!' "

On his Flatstock 2008 poster, left:

"This is an adaptation of one of my best-selling posters to date. It was originally for the Reverend Horton Heat in 2004. I wish I could have included a skull in the design somewhere—that would have covered all of the clichés necessary for the quintessential rock poster."

Keep reading for more examples of Lil Tuffy's work.

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Flosstradamus, September 2007, San Francisco

"I wanted the poster to look like everyone I knew collided, and the end result was some sort of hipster explosion."

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Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, January 2006, San Francisco

"I was listening to Malkmus and trying to come up with some ideas for this poster, and I kept getting this psychedelic vibe—I think it was his song about gravity bongs that probably did it. That's where the paisley came from. Also, it was winter at the time, and girls around town had been wearing all of these brightly colored tights with wool jumpers. I combined the two."

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Sebadoh, February 2007, San Francisco

"The design was the result of being totally frustrated and spending hours playing with different elements. The black was a bad photocopy of a sunken battleship and the eye shape was from another dead-end project. If you rotate the poster 90 degrees, you'll be able to tell that it was originally intended to be a tiki-inspired flame from a candle."

"It was a sold-out show, with so much electricity in the air. For the design, I wanted to reflect how all three musicians have such energy and are so alive when they perform. Dan Deacon told me he loved it."

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Black Moth Super Rainbow, March 2007, Austin

"I did this poster for their South by Southwest shows. I started with images of random faces and started to tweak them in different ways. The band's music is psychedelic and complex, so I wanted this poster to reflect that."

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Of Montreal, October 2007, Knoxville, Tennessee

"This poster was definitely influenced by the stage antics of [lead singer] Kevin Barnes. Of Montreal's live show is insane, and I really feel like this poster captures the feeling of the band."

"Rock poster art is one way to be involved in the show as a fan of the music. It's a way to bridge my two main interests—drawing and music—and occasionally include my third- and fourth-favorite interests—dogs and bikes."

"Flatstock is well-orchestrated madness, and this poster features some sort of poster-delivery truck one moment after a run-in with a telephone pole, as the contents of the truck (cardboard mailing tubes) are ejected."

Keep reading for more examples of Jay Ryan's work.

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Andrew Bird, November 2006, Chicago

"This drawing was inspired by the first couple lines in Andrew Bird's song 'Armchairs': 'I dreamt you were a cosmonaut of the space between our chairs, and I was a cartographer of the tangles in your hair.' I started with the hair, and the drawing unfolded from there."

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The Frames, September 2007 tour

"This drawing was partially taken from a scene in the film Once, and was partially based on the Radiohead song 'High and Dry,' which Glen quotes as the opening line on the album The Cost."

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Death Cab for Cutie, March 2006, Nottingham

"The poster consists of three cats, sitting indoors, watching out the window as volcanoes erupt in the distance. Though we can't see their faces, the cats don't seem to be panicking, but seem interested or intrigued by this scene, which could, of course, be their demise."

"My posters are sleek, Northwest-inspired vector-drawn landscapes. I like how poster art creates a harmonious fusion of visual art and music. What can be better than that?"

On Flatstock:

"The poster community is basically a bunch of friends from all over the country. I really look forward to Flatstocks because we all have music and art in common."

Keep reading for more examples of Mike Klay's work.

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Kinski, March 2006, Seattle

"This poster is based on a photo I took of the end of a chairlift on Mount Hood. The hut was so frozen and just looked so eerie that that harshness translated perfectly into a poster for the Seattle-based psych-rock band."

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Ladytron, October 2006, Seattle

"The electricity in this poster gives a sense of the fuzziness that is Ladytron. The members of the band freaked out when they saw this because one of them loves owls. The overall sense and style of the band has a direct influence on my designs."

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The Chemical Brothers, April 2005, Seattle

"I wanted to steer clear of the electronica stereotype that this band generates all the time. The simplicity and beauty of this poster has made it one of my most-sought-after prints. The branches are drawn from a photo I took looking up at a tree in Portland."

"I like that the poster becomes this relic, an artifact of this one show that can bring back feelings and memories in ways that a photograph can't do justice. In my studio, I can see posters for the last Archers of Loaf and Polvo shows, and I recall smoking cigars at a gas station on 54, and a 'misplaced' handicapped parking sign—things that I have no pictures to remind me of, despite using a roll of film at each show."

On his Flatstock 2008 poster, left:

"A lot of the posters I do feature our cats, June and Zoey, hence the littering of cat pictures within the poster. I've also developed this strange fascination with elephants recently, going so far as to create an art print—which I rarely do—featuring a jovial white-collar elephant. Originally this poster featured a zombie eating a stuffed animal elephant; at some point the zombie became me."

Keep reading for more examples of Chris Williams' work.

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Lotus, January 2008, Carrboro, North Carolina

"I decided to learn how to draw a lotus flower, then more or less forgot. They look strong, and I can only imagine a full garden would be able to take down a man. All the little details in my work are probably just a by-product of my being a pack rat, inadvertently trying to collect as many things as possible into one space."

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Dean and Britta, February 2008, Carrboro, North Carolina

"There's this suave, sixties style to the band that brought to mind these paper lanterns I've had around our house for years. And the chair: In my head it looks so comfortable; in reality I know it's not."

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Josh Ritter, November 2007, Carrboro, North Carolina

"I can't explain the jump from Josh Ritter's music to a sea horse, but it just made sense. It was one of those designs that just clicked. I had an idea, went back and listened to the song, and bam! The entire thing was ready, complete with Dream Pets found around our house."